“There’s nothing like deduction. We’ve determined everything about our problem but the solution.”

“If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.”

“The general method involved may be very simply stated. In cases where the equilibrium values of our variables can be regarded as the solutions of an extremum (maximum or minimum) problem, it is often possible regardless of the number of variables involved to determine unambiguously the qualitative behavior of our solution values in respect to changes of parameters.”

“A person's ability to see problems from various points of view and then determine solution steps is not a form of ordinary intelligence in general, but a form of wisdom.”

“We’ve run into a problem.”

“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

“The type of rationality we assume in economics — perfect, logical, deductive rationality — is extremely useful in generating solutions to theoretical problems. But it demands much of human behavior — much more in fact than it can usually deliver. If we were to imagine the vast collection of decision problems economic agents might conceivably deal with as a sea or an ocean, with the easier problems on top and more complicated ones at increasing depth, then deductive rationality would describe human behavior accurately only within a few feet of the surface. For example, the game Tic-Tac-Toe is simple, and we can readily find a perfectly rational, minimax solution to it. But we do not find rational “solutions” at the depth of Checkers; and certainly not at the still modest depths of Chess and Go.”

“Seventy million people will talk about seventy million solutions to the same problem.”

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”